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Readers have had a few interesting discussions recently on moving to a lower cost of living area — so I thought we’d start a discussion on things to consider before you make a move like that!
These are some of the top concerns I’ve seen voiced by readers, below — what would your concerns be? Readers, what are your best tips on what to consider moving to a lower cost of living area?
(Here's a handy COL calculator…)
If You Live Far From Your Company, Health Insurance Might Become an Issue
If you’re going remote and moving away from your company's offices, do note: The company insurance plan may no longer apply to you! Often companies only cover a limited geographic area (which may be pretty wide, like a tri-state area), but as you get further away from the center, the options for doctors and hospitals may be so scarce that you might end up preferring getting your own insurance through the marketplace. (Fortunately, moving to a different zip code is a qualifying event, so you won't have to wait until the general enrollment period.)
{related: the Type A guide to moving}
And if you’ve never bought insurance through the marketplace… prepare for some headaches! My family's health insurance is through the marketplace, and it feels like we’re paying through the nose and jumping through hoops to go to doctors or get specific things covered… and all on our own, because we’re the only ones we know with the insurance. Wheee.
{related: where you live is one of the biggest money decisions you make}
Don't Assume There Will Be Plentiful Childcare Options
This may not be a big deal if you don’t have children yet, but readers have noted that childcare can be a lot less flexible in the suburbs. There may only be one or two choices for daycares, and they may have an absolute drop-dead pickup time of 5 p.m.
Similarly, readers have noted that aftercare may be difficult to find for school-age kids — and schools themselves may pose a problem from a commuting perspective.
Speaking about a potential NYC to Chicago move, one reader cautioned:
There are selective enrollment schools (i.e. gifted program, more or less) which require a test to enter, and also sometimes a lottery, but they are scattered around the (rather large) city. Depending on where you ended up living, schooling and associated traffic can really impact your overall quality of life (a school which on paper is 2 mi from home might take 30 min or more to get to, depending on where both are located.).
Don't Assume You'll Go Back All the Time
Many would-be movers say to themselves, ah, but I'll go back to [HCOL city] all the time to see friends and enjoy the things I love, so the financial savings will definitely make sense! But readers have cautioned that in reality that almost never happens.
One reader (discussing a possible move from a LCOL city back to a HCOL city) noted:
[W]e moved to a LCOL area 1.5 hours from a major city thinking “no big deal, we’ll just go to the city all the time.” We’ve gone literally once since we moved here three years ago. It’s just a little too far for a day trip (especially with traffic) and hotels are so expensive in that city that if we’re plunking down that kind of money, we’d rather cough up a couple hundred bucks for plane tickets and go somewhere we haven’t been. So this is a nice idea in theory, but I think you generally need to go into a move expecting that you’re not going to get to the city that much.
So really look at your potential new city with open eyes. As we've noted before, you should think about walkability, availability of ethnic foods, trendier restaurants, hard-to-find ingredients, entertainment options, differences among seasons, and more. (Here's another great reader threadjack on what to consider before you move…)
If your target city is in the U.S., you may want to read the article in The Atlantic on “How America Fractured Into Four Parts,” which is a really interesting rebuke to the idea that it's just “coastal elites” vs. everyone else.
{related: what to consider if you're thinking about moving to the suburbs}
Readers, what would be your primary thing to look at if you were considering moving to a lower cost of living area?
{related: do the benefits of living closer to work outweigh the cons?}
Stock photo via Stencil.
Mouse
I haven’t had to make a move like this myself, but there are often additional costs to living in smaller/different cities – – – – Owning and maintaining a car
– International airports may be much further away , or you’ll have to do more layovers/stops due to your location
– Less likely to be a tour stop for musicians, musicals, etc.
Anon
Not quite the same thing as HCOL vs LCOL but adjacent to that conversation: I live in a rural area (still actually HCOL, but I know frequently LCOL can be rural) and there are just none of the conveniences of big city life. Shops close by 5, restaurants close by 9, there’s no Blue Apron, nowhere in town to get Botox, nowhere to buy specialty food ingredients in person, etc. They’re little things that don’t necessarily outweigh the benefits of living here, but I definitely notice their absence.
Anon
I struggle with this too. No tailors, no cobblers (no ability to repair and reuse your belongings). Hairdressers all give you the same tacky 80s mom ‘do (forget finding a classy cut for textured hair). My wide duck feet can’t find a single fitted shoe in an actual store (gotta do that dastardly online shopping).
Anon
When my sister in a small town had covid, I tried to send her grocery delivery and it did not exist in her area!
Enid
I look at the intangible of a lower cost city, less noise, cleaner air, lower blood pressure less stress of daily life. Compare to big city traffic, higher stress with parking, tickets, more crime, more pollution, city government more hostile with taxes and the list goes on.
I choose smaller city with lower cost of living.
Anon
As someone who has lived in a very rural area for 15 years and recently moved to a town of 20,000 in the middle of an extremely isolated part of the country, here are some other factors to consider (mainly in rural areas, so not all LCOL areas)
*access to Healthcare (a lot of times I am driving 90 minutes one-way to see a physical therapist or specialist
*choice of grocery stores (for awhile, the only option close by was Wal mart.
*childcare I know was mentioned, but in my current town there is a 2-3 YEAR waiting list to even get childcare. No exaggeration! And nannies don’t seem common either.
*asset building. The COL may be lower, but your house may not appreciate quickly and if you have lower wages and if you are putting away a percentage of your wages in retirement, you’ll end up with a lot less making it difficult to move back to a higher cost of living area in retirement
*schooling- there are not a lot of options in some rural areas where a whole district may be in one building. There is also not a lot of diversity in the areas I have lived which I think has been a loss for myself and my kids.
*connections. A lot of what gets done in rural areas is through church and family connections. It is easy to be viewed as an outsider for a long time.
There are advantages and disadvantages wherever you choose (I always read this blog fascinated by how we all live in auch different worlds!). No place is perfect and there are really amazing parts about living in more rural areas, but I just thought I’d share some of the challenges I have noticed.
Anon
The childcare point is a good one if the LCOL area is at all rural (although I doubt it’s a concern in a big city like Chicago). I live in a small college town in the Midwest that is extremely LCOL, except for childcare. Quality childcare is very difficult to find here, and also very expensive. I paid almost as much for infant care as my friends in the SF Bay Area, and my house costs literally 10 times less than the equivalent house would cost in the Bay Area. Childcare does not scale.
Anonymous
I think college towns are the exception though — you don’t get that worldly view / love of learning elsewhere in other LCOL areas.
Anon
Just a counterpoint, we live in a very rural LCOL and have a very affordable home-based daycare. It is one of the big reasons we’re staying here until kiddos are in school. I think this might just be a luck-of-the-draw
OP
There are more options for home-based than center-based in my area too. I was uncomfortable with anything home-based because of the lack of oversight. I think if you can find a great home-based place, it can be as good or better than the best center, but the worst home-based daycares are worse than the worst centers, if that makes sense. People in big cities seem to have way more options for highly rated daycare centers than the people I know in smaller towns.
Bonnie Kate
I live in a LCOL small town/upper midwest.
Those are very, very good points. Particularly the health insurance state to state issue and the child care for parents. The child care situation is brutal. I’ve watched my friends and sisters struggle with the very limited options for years. If we would have had kids, I would have been a SAHM for a couple years – it’s simply the most logical choice. but luckily we’re childfree by choice.
I’ll add –
Check your internet options and cell phone coverage before you move/buy a house. Don’t assume that your internet options are fast or good. It varies widely. Actually call the internet providers to see what speeds you can get. Dish internet is not good; you do not want to be remote working with it.
You will almost definitely need a car for each adult, or you’re going to feel very restricted. Get used to driving for things, but it’s not going to be stuck-in-traffic driving, mostly highway driving. I drive 30 minutes for groceries/errands once a week, but it’s easy driving. Dollar Generals are plentiful in many rural small town areas and closer for basic quick supplies. At least in my area, there are a lot of small farmer/Amish stands and little tiny shops that will start to open up now in the spring/summer/fall and they are wonderful for buying directly from the farmers – but it has taken me years to really discover them (and I’m just starting to now) because they don’t advertise and it’s pretty word of mouth for discovering them.
For making friends/community, much of the same advice applies – join a community service club or organization, go to regular classes at gyms/yoga studios (smaller than the big city ones but they’re around!), get coffee at the same restaurant or coffee shop consistently at the same time/weekday, go to town festivals and events, go to the small public libraries, etc. I used to think that it might be harder to make friends in a small town because of the smaller amount of people, but after reading here for years I think most of the same principles apply. If anything, it may be easier in a friendly small town to get enveloped into a community – it would be in mine if you show up at certain events/classes.
Bonnie Kate
I do want to add some good things to LCOL rural living.
-buying a house is difficult (low supply) but not impossible; it’s mostly a patience game, not a you’re totally priced out of the system gam.
-very close to nature. my house is surrounded by trees, not people or buildings.
-community is close and welcoming. I don’t live in the same community where I grew up, but I’ve developed close ties.
-there are less amenities, but the small shops and coffeeshops are gems.
-secondhand shopping is very good for great furniture (fb marketplace, etc.) lol this might be just for me.
-assuming you set yourself up right, it’s very easy to live here in day to day life.
Anon
Think about whether your nearest hospital is the one that people are getting life flighted to or the one that people are getting life flighted from. I moved away from a trauma one hospital and wonder if that was a mistake.
pugsnbourbon
Also healthcare-related – think about how your reproductive rights may be affected by a move.
Here’s a list of states with trigger laws or similar in the event Roe gets overturned this summer: https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2021/10/26-states-are-certain-or-likely-ban-abortion-without-roe-heres-which-ones-and-why
Bonnie Kate
My cousin has sited this a reason she won’t move from her major metro area (even more specific actually – she wants very close proximity to a top children’s hospital) even though she dislikes the city as a whole. She doesn’t have sick kids, so I always thought that it was a fairly limiting. But I’ve never lived close to a hospital where people are getting life flighted to, so the concept is fairly alien to me. So to each their own.
Anon
It’s not something I had ever thought about until two young, previously healthy people in my life needed to be life flighted in really high stakes circumstances. (One was okay in the end, but the other person wasn’t actually able to be flown because of weather conditions, and he had to be driven more than an hour away to reach a hospital that could do a very urgent emergency surgery.)
Anon
I think it also wasn’t the same kind of consideration when I was growing up? My understanding is that in the last decade or so, out-of-the-way hospitals have been closing or relocating to big central facilities, and that other out-of-the-way hospitals have been losing specialists and specialized facilities.
I’ve been told that part of this is ACA incentives/bureaucracy, and part of it is just that many physicians want to live and raise their kids in the kinds of places they went to school, medical school, and residency (usually not out of the way places!).
Anon
Agreed on medical care! My kid needs some (pretty common) specialists that are easy for me to get to in DC, but people in rural areas spend entire days traveling for an 1 hour appointment.
Anonymous
Oh man I was visiting a friend in a LCOL area and it took so many flights to connect to the small airport, then the food options in the city were just absolutely sad and pedestrian. My friend was so thrilled to take me for falafel, the lone ethnic choice that was brand new. I’ll always be a city gal at heart but that trip really cemented it for me. Having to drive to get anywhere was such a pain in the butt, I wasted so much of my day just in a car.
Anon
I have also heard this complaint about my area from friends. As a GERD patient I’m only eating boring bland cr@p anyway, so I can’t claim to miss good ethnic restaurants.
Anon
Small town isn’t necessarily synonymous with bad food. I live in a college town and we have great ethnic food here, because the college attracts faculty and students from all over the world. I do agree about the bad airport access though (our town doesn’t even have an airport – we have to drive 1.5 hours and even that airport is not a major hub).
Anon
I made a similar move for my husband’s job.
Pros:
Childcare is plentiful and inexpensive. I toured kiddo’s daycare when I was 37 weeks pregnant and got a slot. It’s a really great facility with wonderful teachers, long hours, and the highest ratings possible. It’s less than $10,000 a year.
Everything is less expensive – restaurants, cocktails, car mechanic rates, private school (the top private high schools, which send kids to outstanding universities, are $11,000 a year). There’s an IB high school as well that we’re considering when kiddo is old enough.
What traffic?
Cons:
What year is it? Move at all outside of the city and its adjacent large suburbs, and it’s 1950 all over again. “Women don’t become engineers or surgeons.” The city area is fine – mostly, but people still come in with these attitudes.
Insularity. Related to the above, people have lived here for generations and not moved out much, and not many people move in. It actually completely changes patterns of communication. There’s a very weird (to me) habit of superimposing what someone else says onto their own experiences, which works fine I guess when everyone lives the same life. When you’ve lived a markedly different life, it’s just impossible to have any meaningful discussion or find common ground.
Lack of job opportunities. remote work has skyrocketed since COVID, but it’s still a lot easier to be at least commuting-ish distance to a large city than out in a college town. Remote jobs get approximately five times as many applicants as hybrid or in-person jobs, which means the competition is intense.
Cat
Basically everything K-t already listed is why we are determined to stay in the city –
-walkability
-ease of travel (not only is it easy to get TO the airport, but lots of nonstop flights available / also Amtrak access)
-lower-maintenance housing (we have 15 feet of sidewalk to care for, not yard to manage, and with a small city house comes the need to purchase far, far less furnishings and decor!)
-great healthcare if / when it’s needed
-variety of restaurant and takeout and entertainment options at lots of price points
-local geography – ability to be at either the beach in an hour or so, or the mountains in two or three
-generally being surrounded by diversity on pretty much every metric.
anon
From these comments, it sounds like it’s not possible to lump all LCOL together. Some of these sound like rural wastelands, some like suburban outposts, some just small towns.
I would submit that there are actual LCOL CITIES with symphonies, high-end groceries, healthcare, daycare, boutique shopping . . . probably not high-speed transportation and walkability though.
Like anything, you pays your money, you takes your choice.
Personally, I would need accessibility to an airport and non-chain restaurants.
Anonymous
Yeah, I agree there are definitely LCOL cities that are still cities, and it’s weird that this discussion seems to be equating LCOL with extremely rural. To a person in NYC or SF, Chicago is LCOL, even though it’s the third largest city in the entire country. To people in most US cities, Indianapolis or Columbus are LCOL. All of these are cities, with plenty of city amenities, and suburbs where you can live a suburban life. Rural areas and small towns are an entirely different kettle of fish, IMO.
Nashvillian
I think one must remember that unless you’re moving to a rural area, the LCOL place you move to may not remain a LCOL place forever. When I moved to Nashville, it was surprisingly affordable and had good healthcare, but it’s airport wasn’t great (not a hub, so everything went through ATL or Charlotte). Now it’s booming and it’s hard not to feel the growing pains. I don’t think this would be a problem in say, rural VA. But if you move to Louisville, or Jackson, MS, or something, it may not stay LCOL forever.
Anonymous
I mean, Nashville is still really affordable compared to most US cities, especially coastal ones. I get that it’s changed since you moved there, but it’s all relative and the cost of living is going up everywhere.
Alex
Reading from abroad, I always get confused on the way your health insurance work (and cost). Back home our work given insurance covers nationwide (and even emergencies abroad)…
I do get the never returning to the city, we have lost a couple couples of friends over the years to the suburbs hahaha
Starter homes are not 800K
In a LCOL area, you may build less equity in a home. In some cases , you will lose money on the sale of real estate. But starter homes will not be $800K.
In a LCOL are, you will be able to save and invest more.
Cars can get expensive, if you are accustomed to not having one or more of them. In some cases, the cost of having one or more cars may greatly offset the benefits of a LCOL area. For example, Chicago is doable without a car. But the suburbs would almost require two cars for a two adults family unit. You can get by with one car, but in a lot of contexts, it can be isolating and a safety concern to leave an adult or an adult with children home without a car.
Chicago to Washington, DC, you feel the approximately 30% difference in cost of living. Moving in the opposite direction is delightful.
Regretful Relocator
My husband and I and our two kids moved from NYC to a suburb outside of a very small city in New England last summer. We were enthralled about being near family, nature, good school rankings with excellent facilities and a large brand new home for mid six figures (five bedrooms — something we could never even imagine in the NYC area). We both got remote jobs with a very significant pay cut as a family. Financially, on the whole our area may be a LCOL but we spend money on different things here (less free stuff to do, utility bills are high, car payments, etc. that it doesn’t feel truly low cost, aside from housing). And taxes, etc. are not low here.
We’ve really really struggled here and are probably moving back to a city ASAP. Here’s why:
-Neither of us loves our jobs and I particularly don’t feel secure in my position. I don’t want to commit to working remotely forever, and the in person job market here sucks and would involve another pay cut.
-My daughter is 3 and I’m pregnant again and the childcare situation here is horrible. We scrambled to even find a spot for my daughter despite looking very far in advance (should have been a red flag before we moved) and the childcare we did find, while super cheap, is very low quality and unstructured with lots of kids per teacher. We’d love to switch her care, but there’s literally no alternatives. There’s no public pre-k here. I’ve already been told there are no spots at the centers for my unborn child at the centers I’ve called except for one which said maybe a spot will open up in June 2023 (four months after my maternity leave ends)…
-It’s boring. There I said it. There’s not a lot to do. We’d spent a lot of time here in the summers before moving and it was amazing, but the other 9 months of the year are a different story. The economy here is very tourist driven and seasonal and basically shuts down October through May.
-Insularity, as someone else said. We are treated like unwelcome interlopers here and have struggled to make any friends (and I’ve tried lots of things including bumble for friends). People were more inclusive in NYC. I had a very diverse and awesome mom friend group in NYC and I thought it was just a thing all moms had no matter where they lived. I regret taking it for granted.
-Zero walkability. I hate driving (I knew this before I moved here but thought I could get over it, but I can’t).
Obviously, it makes us extremely sad to contemplate moving away from my extended family after we basically just got here, but we feel moving now will be better for our family in the long run and we have no reason to believe the problems we’ve identified will get better. Managing and maintaining a giant house is no picnic, and I’m so excited to live in a building with a gym again. And, you know, just walk down the street with my kids and run into people. It’s just sad here showing up to a public playground and literally being the only family there.